Book Description

Abstract: Despite the long success of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) as the theory of the strong interactions, there remains much to be understood about the structure of hadrons and the consequences of QCD in the nonperturbative regime. Lattice gauge theory, a framework nearly as old as QCD itself, makes calculations in this regime possible, starting from first principles. With advances in theoretical understanding, methods, and computer technology, the lattice has found application to an ever-widening range of problems. In this dissertation, I consider two such problems having to do with the structure of baryons. The first concerns the contribution of sea quarks, and the strange quark in particular, to form factors of the nucleon. This has been a long-standing challenge for the lattice, because such contributions involve the insertion of a current on a quark loop, demanding the full inversion of the discretized Dirac operator, conceptually a large sparse matrix. I discuss methods for addressing this challenge and present a calculation of the strange scalar form factor and the related parameter f Ts . The latter is of great theoretical interest, since it enters into the cross section for the scattering of dark matter off nuclei in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. As such, it represents a major uncertainty in the interpretation of direct detection experiments. I also present results for the strange quark contribution to the nucleon's axial and electromagnetic form factors, which are themselves the subject of active experimental programs. These calculations were performed using the Wilson fermion formulation on a 24 3 x 64 anisotropic lattice. In the second part of the dissertation, I turn to the valence sector and address the role of diquark correlations in the observed spectrum of hadrons and their properties. A diquark is a correlated pair of quarks, thought to play an important role in certain phenomenological models of hadrons. I present results for baryon wave functions, evaluated in both the Coulomb and Landau gauges. By comparing baryons that differ in their diquark content, I find evidence for enhanced correlation in the scalar diquark channel, as favored by QCD-inspired quark models. I also present results for diquark mass splittings, determined from diquark correlators in the Landau gauge. This second set of calculations was performed with the overlap Dirac operator on quenched gauge configurations at B = 6.